[Apologies for duplicate emails.]
Dear Gilles,
These points were discussed on the Anti Abuse Working Group mailing
lists quite extensively in June and December 2012. As you correctly
pointed out policy ripe-563 says "This policy introduces a new contact
attribute named "abuse-c:”, that can be included in inetnum, inet6num
and aut-num objects." During the discussions last year it was asked if
the RIPE NCC should 'interpret' policy. Our understanding is that this
policy expresses the desire and goal of the RIPE community for a new
feature in the RIPE Database. To achieve these goals this desire needs
to be translated into, and incorporated in, an efficient, technical
database design.
In the RIPE Labs article
https://labs.ripe.net/Members/kranjbar/implementation-details-of-policy-2011-06
we pointed out that there are about 3.7 million Internet resource
objects in the RIPE Database. To add an "abuse-c:" attribute physically
to each of these objects is unmanageable. Every users network is
physically linked to their existing ORGANISATION object. Each user only
needs to add one "abuse-c:" attribute in their ORGANISATION object and
all their networks are covered.
When any address is queried in the RIPE Database, the software will find
the related "abuse-c:" reference and return this information as part of
the query. By returning this information as a default with each query we
have satisfied the policy requirement that the "abuse-c:" is "included
in inetnum, inet6num and aut-num objects". It is not physically stored
in each object in an unmanageable way, but logically associated with
each object in an efficient and manageable way.
This implementation was presented to and discussed by the community on
the Anti Abuse Working Group mailing list last year and Brian declared
that a consensus had been reached in his email on December 5, on behalf
of the co-chairs of the DB and AA Working Groups:
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/anti-abuse-wg/2012-December/001993.html
In a follow up RIPE Labs article
https://labs.ripe.net/Members/denis/creating-and-finding-abuse-contacts-in-the-ripe-database
the RIPE NCC explained how this implementation works in practise. You
may recall that we discussed the details of how these references using
the ORGANISATION object worked and how they can be fine tuned:
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/anti-abuse-wg/2012-December/001998.html
The old RIPE Database reference manuals on the ripe.net web site still
refer to the use of "abuse-mailbox:" attributes in other object types,
but don't refer to "abuse-c:" at all. These attributes were never
allowed to be added directly to the resource objects even in the legacy
software. These old reference manuals are now out of date in many
respects and should perhaps be clearly marked as archived documents.
I hope this answers your specific questions.
Regards
Denis Walker
Business Analyst
RIPE NCC Database Team
On 27/06/2013 10:06, Gilles Massen wrote:
> Dear WG, and RIPE NCC staff,
>> While trying to add an abuse-c to our resources, I was quite surprised
> that you can only attach the abuse-c to an org object (while the policy
> suggests otherwise and implementation notes are not very clear on the
> limitation).
>> So I'd like to ask why this restriction exists? What is wrong with
> adding an abuse-c directly to an inet[6]num or aut-num?
>> Best regards,
> Gilles
>